Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel Recomp

Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel - Xbox 360 recompilation

Image notice: I do not own this image. The Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel cover art is the property of its respective owners (Electronic Arts Inc.) and is included here for identification purposes only.

A static recompilation of the Xbox 360 version of Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel to a native Windows executable, built on the ReXGlue SDK. The game's PowerPC code is translated to C++ at build time from your own disc dump; the SDK provides the Xbox 360 kernel, GPU (Direct3D 12), audio and input.

This repository contains no game code or data. You need a legally owned copy of the game.

Project-side additions

On top of the plain recompilation:

• Player settings window (F4) - a themed settings page with only what players need: key bindings (with the game's action names), mouse sensitivity and invert Y, fullscreen, V-Sync, aspect ratio, image filter, texture filtering, mute. "Advanced settings" shows every SDK option.
• Keyboard and mouse - WASD movement, mouse look, LMB fire, RMB aim, Shift dash; all rebindable in the settings window or settings/hardware.toml.
• Rendering fixes for this game (see thirdparty/patches/):
  • HDR scene resolved and sampled as integers (the integer number format of 16-bit fixed textures, unsupported upstream) - without it the game renders almost black.
  • Memexport (GPU-written data) is copied back to game memory per changed value, queued instead of stalling - the game's GPU particles otherwise corrupt the job system or stutter.
  • Only the render results the CPU actually reads are copied back (the lighting input and the small exposure buffers), instead of every resolve.
  • The screen-space ambient occlusion pass renders as horizontal stripes under emulation and is replaced with "no occlusion" (ao2dc_disable_ssao).
  • Delayed render readbacks no longer overwrite the GPU's newer copy (smoke and other half-resolution effects were cut into 32-pixel blocks).
• Recompiler fixes - PowerPC memory barriers (sync, lwsync, eieio) are emitted as fences instead of nothing, so the compiler cannot reorder the game's lock-free thread handoffs; the vector 2^x estimate (vexptefp) no longer wraps to huge values for very negative inputs (the audio mixer's decibel-to-gain conversions use it).
• Audio - a look-ahead limiter (audio_limiter, on by default) keeps the game's mix from hard-clipping when gunfire stacks several copies of a sound, and underruns fade instead of clicking. ao2dc_audio_record saves the last 90 s of the game's mix and of the device signal to logs/ and enables the XMA diagnostics in the log.
• Kernel fixes - stale dispatch objects in reused memory (crash on KeSetEvent), instant storage-device selection.
• Crash report - a crash writes the faulting call stack, with recompiled function names, to logs/crash.txt next to the executable.

Requirements

• Windows 10/11, a Direct3D 12 GPU with rasterizer-ordered views (any recent AMD/NVIDIA/Intel)
• CMake 3.25+
• Git (SDK submodule + patches)
• Ninja
• Clang / LLVM (winget install LLVM.LLVM), plus the Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (C++ workload) for the Windows SDK and linker environment
• About 16 GB of free RAM for the code generation step
• ABGX360 to dump the Xbox 360 disc, or extract-xiso to unpack an existing ISO
• Your own legally owned copy of Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel (Xbox 360)

Getting the SDK

The ReXGlue SDK is pinned as a git submodule in thirdparty/rexglue-sdk and built together with the game:

git clone --recursive <this repo>
# or, in an existing clone:
git submodule update --init --recursive

Local SDK fixes live in thirdparty/patches/ and are applied to the submodule at configure time by cmake/apply_sdk_patches.cmake (idempotent; the submodule's commit is never changed).

Getting the game data

1. Dump the Xbox 360 disc with ABGX360 (verify it against the values below) or extract an existing ISO with extract-xiso, which unpacks the disc's file tree.
2. Copy the extracted contents directly into assets/, so default.xex sits at assets/default.xex alongside the rest of the disc's files ($SystemUpdate/, Content/, Data/, Movies/, AO4.Main.xex, AO4.Splash.xex, Engine.BuildInfo.xex, NxeArt). Some tools extract it as Default.xex; either spelling works on Windows.
3. assets/ is gitignored (assets/* in .gitignore, with assets/README.md as the only tracked file) - nothing from the disc is, or should be, committed to this repo.

The game files are never copied into the build output either: the recompiler reads the three XEX files from assets/ at build time, and the game reads its data from assets/ at run time.

Target retail release (verify your dump matches):

Field	Value
Title ID	454109AB
Media ID	60F8EF51
Version	0.0.0.11 (disc 1/1, no title update)

File	SHA-1
default.xex	b7f987b19a6f392d6c74b65444bd4b3e4eb8d924
AO4.Main.xex	64da993ea47798252dd580c8625afac45b64df27
Engine.BuildInfo.xex	3ad0e5f5913d68c927a67439e833538e613b0558

default.xex, AO4.Main.xex and Engine.BuildInfo.xex all carry the Title ID, Media ID and version above. The build also prints them for every XEX it recompiles. Check the hashes with certutil -hashfile assets\AO4.Main.xex SHA1 (Windows) or sha1sum assets/*.xex.

Building

From a "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022" (or after running vcvars64.bat), with LLVM first on PATH:

cmake --preset win-amd64-release
cmake --build out/build/win-amd64-release

The first build compiles the SDK, recompiles the game from assets/ (this takes a while and a lot of memory) and compiles the generated code. Later builds only redo what changed.

Running

Run out/build/win-amd64-release/ArmyOfTwoTDC X360 Recomp.exe. Saves, the shader cache and logs stay inside the project (user/, cache/, out/build/.../logs/).

Default controls: WASD move, mouse look, LMB fire, RMB aim, Shift dash, Space/Enter A, Backspace/F B, R/E X, Q Y, G LB, V RB, Esc Start, Tab Back, 1-4 or arrows D-pad. Press F4 for settings; Alt+Tab releases the mouse.

Settings

settings/hardware.toml holds the runtime settings (graphics, input, the game-specific fixes). The F4 window edits and saves the same file.

Legal

This project does not include any part of the game. Army of Two is a trademark of Electronic Arts Inc. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts.